Guilt: The Sunday Times best selling psychological thriller that you need to read in 2018

Zara, you and your lover follow me towards the sofa, wrapped together like a pair of climbing plants. I pour you a glass of wine each, which you untangle yourselves to accept, and then we all sit in a row: Sebastian in the middle on our large brown sofa, my left thigh pressed against his right. I shift away a little. He turns to me and gives me another shot of his grin. I hold steady, lowering my eyes. I don’t grin back.

He takes a sip of wine and asks, ‘How’s your job going?’

‘Hard work. Heavy hours but it’s rewarding all the same.’

‘Did Zara tell you I had an interview with Harrison Goddard?’

I try to suppress a grin. ‘She might have mentioned it; she does sometimes talk about you,’ I say.

‘They’ve just offered. Today.’ There is a pause. ‘I’ve already accepted.’

My stomach tightens. So. My sister’s boyfriend is coming to work in my office. A man with dangerous eyes and an over-exuberant grin.

‘When do you start?’ I ask.

‘Next week.’

‘Be prepared. They like to take their pound of flesh.’

‘That’s why I love photography,’ you chip in. ‘It gives me freedom and range.’

My stomach curdles as you say that. It sounds so pseudy. But it’s true, you have always loved photography, ever since you were a young girl.

‘I’m used to it. The firm I came from in London were just the same,’ Sebastian continues.

‘What made you leave London?’ I ask for the sake of something to say. ‘Isn’t London the Metropolis? The place to be?’

‘I was brought up here in Bristol. My parents still live here. I just wanted to move back to where I grew up. It’s so much smaller, so much more charming than London.’

Sebastian suddenly loses interest in conversation with me. He leans across and kisses you. You melt together on the sofa like an octopus. When you have finished exploring each other’s mouths, Sebastian retrieves his wine glass from the floor. He looks straight at me, wanting to talk to me once again.

‘Any chance of coming to mine for a drink some time, to give me a run-down on the organisation before I start?’ he asks with a smile and a flash of his eyes.

A few days later, walking to work, pulling my way up Park Street with a heavy file in my bag, I feel my phone vibrate in my pocket. I pick up.

‘Miranda.’ His voice is in my ear.

‘Sebastian.’

I hear him breathing down the phone.

‘Can you come to mine tonight, like you promised? I really could do with a Harrison Goddard run-down.’

Promised? Did I? I don’t remember saying that exactly. But he must have got my mobile number from you, Zara, so how can I refuse?

‘Tonight OK?’

‘I suppose so, yes.’

‘No need to sound so enthusiastic.’

‘No, I mean it’s fine. I’ll look forward to seeing you.’

So, after a long day at work, I am visiting his Edwardian house in Clifton. He answers the door, treating me to a swashbuckling grin. There is something maverick about him. Modern-day pirate. Modern-day Errol Flynn.

‘Come in,’ he says, welcoming me into a bland magnolia entrance hall, containing nothing but an umbrella stand and a mirror.

‘Follow me,’ he commands.

Out of the entrance hall, into the sitting room of this fine house. A room with patio doors onto the perfectly kept garden. But the room is spiky and cold. No photographs of people. No clutter. No trinkets.

‘How long have your family lived here?’

‘My mother grew up in this house.’

Silence for a while. Then: ‘Can I get you a drink? A glass of wine? Whisky? G&T?’

Leaning towards me, a smile in his eyes. The corner of his mouth curling, as though he is about to laugh.

‘A cup of tea please.’

The laugh. Overegged and resonant.

‘Zara said you were a cup of tea kind of girl.’

I bristle. ‘What’s that meant to mean?’

‘Nothing. It was just a joke.’ There is a pause. ‘OK, OK, what would you like? Orange pekoe? Lapsang souchong?’

‘Builder’s please.’

Another laugh. Head back. Raucous. ‘I didn’t have you down as a builder’s girl.’

‘I don’t want you to have me down as anything.’

‘Make yourself at home. I’ll go and get the tea.’

He leaves the room. I sink into one of the creamy leather sofas. Pale and elegant. Colourless. I occupy myself by looking around the room. The painting above the fireplace looks like an imitation Rothko – pale rectangles, no subject. There is an unnervingly tidy bookcase: authors filed alphabetically as in a bookshop or library. Bret Easton Ellis, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike.

Sebastian pads back into the room, carrying a cup of tea for me and a glass of whisky for himself. He hands me the tea and sits next to me on the sofa. I edge away.

‘I hear that Zara tells you everything, so you know I’ve been away at university and working in London?’

‘I know you have a first-class CV.’

‘I understand you do too. Do you think we’re two of a kind?’

He pushes his eyes into mine. I edge a little further away, and sip my tea.